(1,636 kb)
(1,636 kb)
When it was time to buy a new Montréal Canadiens jersey in Roch Carrier's children's story The Hockey Sweater, young Roch's mother placed her order through the Eaton's catalogue. "My mother was proud... the only clothes that were good enough for us were the latest styles from Eaton's catalogue," wrote Carrier.
The author's mother was not alone. In the years after Irish immigrant Timothy Eaton founded the company in 1869 as a small downtown Toronto dry goods store, the company became a central part of Canadian daily life and consciousness as a full-line department store with a broad selection of goods, including jewellery, carpets and laces.
Eaton's, which would later be run by several of Timothy's descendants, was also famous for its policy of selling items as marked, with no haggling over prices, its promise of "Money Refunded if Goods Not Satisfactory," and, of course, its catalogue, which offered everything from farm tools and wedding rings, to home remedies and prefabricated homes.
For more than a century, the company's innovative approach to retailing kept Eaton's at the forefront of Canadian department stores. In the 1950s, Eaton's laid claim to more than half of all department store spending in Canada; in the 1990s, the company had 90 stores; and in 1992, sales hit the $2.1-billion mark.
But like its renowned catalogue, which disappeared in 1976, Eaton's would soon be erased from Canada's retail landscape, the victim of years of mismanagement, stiff competition from aggressive American retailers such as Wal-Mart and an economic downturn in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
On February 27, 1997, executives for the venerable department store chain admitted the unthinkable: after 128 years as a Canadian institution, the company could no longer pay its bills. With outstanding debts of $330 million, Eaton's sought protection from its creditors, closed 21 stores, and hired a new chief executive officer.
But it was a case of too little, too late: on May 18, 1999, Eaton's was forced to hang a 'for sale' sign on its remaining stores.
Eaton's was not the first department store chain to fall: previous casualties had included K-Mart, Woodwards and Towers. Nevertheless, the venerable chain's fall from grace devastated long-time shoppers, who for decades had made Eaton's their department store of choice.
"If Timothy Eaton were alive and saw this he'd be a pretty sad man," one bargain hunter said during an auction where cash registers, desks and well-worn chairs from Eaton's better times were up for grabs.
The company's downfall brought an end to the heyday of Canadian family-owned department stores, but the Eaton name lives on. On December 30, 1999, Sears Canada Inc. spent $60 million to acquire all Eaton's trademarks and 16 of its outlets. In the fall of 2000, Sears planned to open full-line, upscale department stores under the banner 'eatons', in Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver and Victoria.